Dearest Carolyn, ah! This is what I love about writing these things: the discussion. Yes. I totally agree about the grandiosity of the imagery, when I first looked at them, I thought: why this medieval stuff for a WWI soldier? A see-saw sort of moment. And then, at some point in the staying-with-it and continuing to look, a kind of story began to unfold in my head. The three angels, seemed to me to be not angels but the family left behind. The work seemed to say to the soldier's children: he's in heaven, and here is is here whenever you wish to see him — comfort for a child. But of course, this is just my imagining. Then I started thinking about the scope of work for a church, the artist had to work with what-would-be-accepted, so the images are St George and St Michael according to the pamphlet about St Paul's stained glass. The pamphlet also says the three faces I took to be the soldier's wife and two children, are: "three angels." The mediaeval armour made me think of Tennyson and his poetic quest to write about Arthur and his Knights, and how Tennyson's poetry would have been known and read by New Zealanders of 1916. All this came into frame slowly as I researched the glass, and landed as a story. The other thing that struck me is that there is no mention of the artist in the pieces of information I found about this work. Maybe stained glass wasn't considered to be art? Merely functional with strict, grand forms? I figured that John Brock was the artist based on style, time and his very distinctive skies. I also reflected on how much time artists spend with a subject. We see the end result, which feels sometimes like a shortcut.
But, all this, and I'm not really responding to your response. Yes. The glass is wobblingly grand, and yet, how to explain my reaction? The sense of being caught? None of the other glass drew me. Why this one? Not sure, but maybe this:
I have a practice of really looking at a thing. Just one thing, for some time, to see what's there, what speaks. Once, on Milford Sound I saw a person video the entire journey, the walls, rocks, waterfalls never once glancing up from the video camera screen, capturing everything and somehow, it seemed to me, missing it all. This translated into a decision on my part, to at least see one thing, which in the case of the Milford Sound, was the continuous gloss of water over dark rock.
I wondered actually about leaving my dreadful snap of the stained glass out of the post, because though you can see the gist of the imagery, my shoddy picture doesn't capture the sunlight, the quiet, the awe at the piece-by-piece making. My photograph seemed to me, like a bad ending in a poem, a kind of collapse. But still, I put it in because: maybe that felt honest? Perhaps allowing for the possibility that what I saw there in that just-look-at-one-thing lunchtime dash was not there at all.
And yet, I couldn't get away from the artistic response to grief. The way we, in our helplessness and protest, make poems. There's a much larger memorial glass to many soldiers in St Paul's, but somehow the stories of these many became more clear to me in the one.
I do admire your determination to stay-with, go deep. Especially in such a situation where the loss and the grief are huge - this person and family, but also the millions of others and their families - and where the artist has worked long and hard to honour and transfigure the grief. Stay-with is the least we can do, and here, I think I've been too quick to react. Your photo is fine. No photo could do the artwork justice, especially art of this nature where the light coming through the glass, time of day, time of year, changing weather, the atmosphere in the cathedral in any given moment, busy or empty and dust-laden, are all part of the shifts that bring the work alive. And dynamic, alive must, I guess, be part of the point, part of the challenge to death and loss. What a perfect art form this is for such a task. What your photo does for me, is insist that I need to go into the cathedral, and sit quietly with the windows. I will do that.
Dear Carolyn, thank you so much for your thoughtful, and thought provoking continued contemplation of all this. Sometimes I’m struck by a thing and my imagination flares out and grabs at the glimmer. Part of it is, I suppose, the sheer time it takes to make a memorial - the staying with - which you’re also engaging with here. Thank you my friend. I’m grateful for your attention to this piece of writing: truely your insights (first and second) make me think further - and for this I’m profoundly grateful. I’m curious to know what you make of the glass if you go to see it. Maybe the subject really is too grand to speak; often the ordinary contains the extraordinary, like the small discs of hollyhock seeds contained in plant-made turret.
I’ve discovered I have a connection with John Brock, the stained-glass artist: and that has become the extraordinary thing for me, and the subject of part 2 in this series.
Thanks Kirstie. Beautifully, tenderly described. It has taken me a while to think my way into the mind-space where this is a response to grief, into a different world view. At first there seemed to be a grandiosity in the images that repelled me. Then I wondered whether the scale of them, both the images and the concept were a counter to the grimness of the death, and war's reduction of the loved person to cannon fodder, just decaying flesh among other unknowns, who will be largely forgotten by history. Is she saying: he was not nothing; he was not no one, and so the mythic splendour reflects the power of her refusal to allow his humanity to be diminished? Transcendence. I'm still not sure that I've understood. Your butterflies get more and more eloquent. Painted in the rain, and therefore partly by the rain. I love that. Exquisite.
Dearest Carolyn, ah! This is what I love about writing these things: the discussion. Yes. I totally agree about the grandiosity of the imagery, when I first looked at them, I thought: why this medieval stuff for a WWI soldier? A see-saw sort of moment. And then, at some point in the staying-with-it and continuing to look, a kind of story began to unfold in my head. The three angels, seemed to me to be not angels but the family left behind. The work seemed to say to the soldier's children: he's in heaven, and here is is here whenever you wish to see him — comfort for a child. But of course, this is just my imagining. Then I started thinking about the scope of work for a church, the artist had to work with what-would-be-accepted, so the images are St George and St Michael according to the pamphlet about St Paul's stained glass. The pamphlet also says the three faces I took to be the soldier's wife and two children, are: "three angels." The mediaeval armour made me think of Tennyson and his poetic quest to write about Arthur and his Knights, and how Tennyson's poetry would have been known and read by New Zealanders of 1916. All this came into frame slowly as I researched the glass, and landed as a story. The other thing that struck me is that there is no mention of the artist in the pieces of information I found about this work. Maybe stained glass wasn't considered to be art? Merely functional with strict, grand forms? I figured that John Brock was the artist based on style, time and his very distinctive skies. I also reflected on how much time artists spend with a subject. We see the end result, which feels sometimes like a shortcut.
But, all this, and I'm not really responding to your response. Yes. The glass is wobblingly grand, and yet, how to explain my reaction? The sense of being caught? None of the other glass drew me. Why this one? Not sure, but maybe this:
I have a practice of really looking at a thing. Just one thing, for some time, to see what's there, what speaks. Once, on Milford Sound I saw a person video the entire journey, the walls, rocks, waterfalls never once glancing up from the video camera screen, capturing everything and somehow, it seemed to me, missing it all. This translated into a decision on my part, to at least see one thing, which in the case of the Milford Sound, was the continuous gloss of water over dark rock.
I wondered actually about leaving my dreadful snap of the stained glass out of the post, because though you can see the gist of the imagery, my shoddy picture doesn't capture the sunlight, the quiet, the awe at the piece-by-piece making. My photograph seemed to me, like a bad ending in a poem, a kind of collapse. But still, I put it in because: maybe that felt honest? Perhaps allowing for the possibility that what I saw there in that just-look-at-one-thing lunchtime dash was not there at all.
And yet, I couldn't get away from the artistic response to grief. The way we, in our helplessness and protest, make poems. There's a much larger memorial glass to many soldiers in St Paul's, but somehow the stories of these many became more clear to me in the one.
I do admire your determination to stay-with, go deep. Especially in such a situation where the loss and the grief are huge - this person and family, but also the millions of others and their families - and where the artist has worked long and hard to honour and transfigure the grief. Stay-with is the least we can do, and here, I think I've been too quick to react. Your photo is fine. No photo could do the artwork justice, especially art of this nature where the light coming through the glass, time of day, time of year, changing weather, the atmosphere in the cathedral in any given moment, busy or empty and dust-laden, are all part of the shifts that bring the work alive. And dynamic, alive must, I guess, be part of the point, part of the challenge to death and loss. What a perfect art form this is for such a task. What your photo does for me, is insist that I need to go into the cathedral, and sit quietly with the windows. I will do that.
Dear Carolyn, thank you so much for your thoughtful, and thought provoking continued contemplation of all this. Sometimes I’m struck by a thing and my imagination flares out and grabs at the glimmer. Part of it is, I suppose, the sheer time it takes to make a memorial - the staying with - which you’re also engaging with here. Thank you my friend. I’m grateful for your attention to this piece of writing: truely your insights (first and second) make me think further - and for this I’m profoundly grateful. I’m curious to know what you make of the glass if you go to see it. Maybe the subject really is too grand to speak; often the ordinary contains the extraordinary, like the small discs of hollyhock seeds contained in plant-made turret.
I’ve discovered I have a connection with John Brock, the stained-glass artist: and that has become the extraordinary thing for me, and the subject of part 2 in this series.
Thanks Kirstie. Beautifully, tenderly described. It has taken me a while to think my way into the mind-space where this is a response to grief, into a different world view. At first there seemed to be a grandiosity in the images that repelled me. Then I wondered whether the scale of them, both the images and the concept were a counter to the grimness of the death, and war's reduction of the loved person to cannon fodder, just decaying flesh among other unknowns, who will be largely forgotten by history. Is she saying: he was not nothing; he was not no one, and so the mythic splendour reflects the power of her refusal to allow his humanity to be diminished? Transcendence. I'm still not sure that I've understood. Your butterflies get more and more eloquent. Painted in the rain, and therefore partly by the rain. I love that. Exquisite.